Brzhan has a broad, squared jaw and close-set teeth that show in a practical, almost alarming grin when he tests a strip of dried fruit. His russet-brown skin is weathered at the temples, and fine ink smudges settle permanently into the creases beside his nails. He waits with his weight planted over the balls of his feet, as if ready to cross a room and verify a claim himself. His walk is brisk and economical; he turns his whole body toward whoever is speaking, giving them the attention of a witness being entered into a record. Unexpectedly, he keeps a tiny, carefully tended pot of white clover on his office sill, and knows how to coax it through winter.

Blunt and exacting, Brzhan is generous with supplies but slow to forgive the person who miscounts them. He distrusts comforting assurances, yet takes people at their word when they admit uncertainty. In a crisis he becomes brisk and decisive; in a quiet office he can be fussy, argumentative, and unexpectedly patient with anyone learning a skill.

Brzhan was raised in a settlement where a missed warning bell could mean a flooded cellar, a fire spreading past the well, or a family left outside the winter wall. As a young storehouse runner, he trusted the senior keeper's spoken assurance that emergency grain had been distributed fairly. When the river broke its banks, three households went hungry while the missing sacks appeared in a merchant's private loft. Brzhan had signed the transfer without checking the witnesses. He spent the next season helping those families rebuild, and began recording every quantity, date, and witness in his own hand. That failure made him exacting, but not indifferent: he sees records as a way to make mutual aid answerable to the people it serves. Years later, he became Chief Ledger Keeper of the Bell-Keepers, a settlement-based mutual-aid and civil-warning association. He still trades clipped arguments with the relief runner who first taught him the warning routes, and quietly worries over an apprentice who has begun copying his stern habits without understanding their purpose. Now a run of missing winter provisions points toward someone inside the association, while a neighboring hamlet asks for aid the stores may not be able to spare.